The United States Postal Service — which is NOT a tax-funded entity — has a simple plea for Shelter Islanders fed up by long waits to pick up packages: Always use a box number in your address.
Also, if you have a compalint about USPS service on Shelter Island, please contact Francine Segarra, the regional manager, who is best reached by email at francine.v.segarra@usps.com, and include any documentation you may have to support your complaint.
That’s the word from Maureen Marion, who is in charge of USPS media relations for the northeast area and engaged in a long conversation with the Gazette on Tuesday that included us reading to her numerous problems reported on various Facebook groups.
Simply put, an enormous increase in package volume is the reason for long delays in retreiving items at Post Offices everywhere, she said. Compounding the problem is an inability to hire additional staff due to contractual limitations coupled with a dramatic drop in sales of regular postage, which is where the service brings in the bulk of its revenue.
“This is a situation we are facing in communities from coast to coast, as people change their shopping habits,” Marion said. “This is not unique to Shelter Island.”
‘Christmas rush since St. Patrick’s Day’
The primary reason for longer waits is the large number of packages arriving at the post offices, even as regular mail volume has fallen off. Packages arrive at a Post Office via the postal system, and also through courier services, like FedEx and UPS, which might offload so-called “last-mile” delivery to the USPS based on calculations that can change day to day, she said.
The enormous change in quantity is due to a pandemic-prompted expansion of online ordering for all sorts of items, from lightweight packages that might include small items like eyeglasses to bulky packages of paper towels and heavy items such as pet chow and cases of water, Marion said.
“There is a shift in how people are shopping,” Marion said. “It further compounds in places like Long Island and Cape Cod and along the Jersey Shore where you have a migration of folks who have left bigger cities to ride out the COVID-19 storm.”
Further exacerbating the problem in resort communities is the seasonal uptick in volume during peak summer vacation season that includes people mailing personal items ahead of their anticipated arrival. “It started earlier, started heavier and started harder.”
Marion said package handling is up 64 percent across the Long Island region compared to the same peak period last year.
“We have been working at Christmas-rush speed and higher since St. Patrick’s Day,” she said. “This has been a brutal sesaon and has been a brutal summer.”
So why not hire additional staff?
“We are working to supplement our wokforce where we can but it is not an easy task for us,” Marion said. “We do not have contractural access or easy access to short-term help. This is not something that the post office does on a regular basis.”
Staffing is tight at all post offices, she said, so trained workers cannot be moved within a region. “It’s all hands on deck, everywhere.”
Currently, the two Island Post Offices are fully-staffed, she said, and there are no active job postings here.
What customers can do to help
With no end in sight, the USPS is working to alleviate wait times where possible, Marion said, and customers have a huge role to play.
When ordering online, if the shipper does not give you an option to include a PO Box, you should employ what she calls “postal-friendly addressing” by including the # symbol followed by the box number at the end of the line for street address and, for extra protection, as a four-digit extension after the ZIP code as follows:
Shelter Island Gazette
13 Grand Avenue #1024
Shelter Island Heights, NY 11965-1024
“People who are using only street addresses are putting our folks in a bind,” she said, of places like Shelter Island where there is no mail delivery. “The post office doesn’t know who you are or where you are. What we can separate by is one thing: the PO Box.”
When an item arrives here without a box number, staffers must sort them by some other means, she said, using as an example a delivery of corkscrews.
“Here come those corkscrews and the package doesn’t have a Post Office box,” she said. That item might be sorted by last name, or maybe by street name. Someone with a different name from the same household comes to pick up the package and asks for it giving the PO Box. “I have to look through all the piles. And the line outside, which is socially distanced and looks even longer than it is, it waits, and waits, and waits.”
“Put the number in the address in a postal-friendly way and then you’re covered with all of the couriers,” she said. It won’t solve all problems — some renters, for instance, may be unaware of Shelter Island’s reliance on PO boxes — but at least, she said, “I can move three or four people more quickly.”
Why not keep packages until someone picks them up?
The USPS cannot hold packages because “there is a finite limit to what we can hang onto in the building,” Marion said. Items are returned to the sender after three business days or sometimes sooner, depending on space demands.
“We are trying to keep things for three days,” she said. “But we don’t have room to keep them beyond that due to the enormity of package volume.”
When told that some people are reporting packages being turned back soon after arrival, she said, “If somebody can provide us with documentation, I’d like to see that.”
Shouldn’t the Post Office know us?
Another frequent complaint found among social media comments is that postal staff don’t seem to know their customers.
“That really is the beauty of living in a small town,” said said, but it also poses a challenge. While people do accrue local knowledge working the same setting for a long time, she said, “if push comes to shove, we don’t know who everybody is and we can’t know who everybody is.”
